Life & Wisdom Quote by Ama Ata Aidoo

The line lands like a backhanded compliment turned into a weapon. “They” is doing the heavy lifting: an unnamed panel of gatekeepers - editors, teachers, critics, whole institutions - who treat “man” as the default setting for seriousness. Aidoo compresses a lifetime of literary policing into one sentence, and the sting is in the casualness. No one has to explain the rules; the rules arrive preloaded.

The intent isn’t just to report sexism, but to expose how praise can be a form of control. To be told you “write like a man” is to be rewarded for sounding as if you’re not yourself, as if authority, clarity, ambition, and intellectual bite are male properties you’ve borrowed. It’s also a demand: keep writing in the register we recognize, don’t make us learn new metrics. Aidoo’s dry phrasing refuses to perform outrage; that restraint sharpens the critique, letting the ugliness of the assumption speak for itself.

Context matters: as a Ghanaian writer working amid postcolonial cultural battles, Aidoo faced two overlapping regimes of expectation - Western literary norms and patriarchal local ones. The quote points to the colonial afterlife inside aesthetics: the “neutral” voice often means a masculinized, Anglophone standard. Her subtext is insurgent: if my work is legible only when misgendered, the problem isn’t my prose. It’s your imagination.